Windows XP has a built-in Windows Picture & Fax Viewer. Many are quick to dismiss this little utility as a basic little image viewing interface and instead they want to use an image viewer of their own choosing, such as ACDSee. But, there is a feature of the Picture & Fax viewer which is kind of cool and that is printing more than one image on a page easily.

To do so, simply select a series of images from your PC. When they are all highlighted, right-click and choose Preview. The Windows Picture & Fax Viewer will pop up and you can then scroll through the selected images. But, you can also hit the Print button (or CTRL-P) and you will get the Photo Printing wizard. Click Next. You'll see the selected photos. Check off the ones you wish to print and click Next. Choose your printer and hit Next again. Once you get to the Layout Selection screen, you can look at the available layouts, including 35 prints per page, wallet-size, and a variety of other options. Once you have selected the options you like, hit Finish (make sure you have the paper you want in your printer) and your images will be printed.

Many people make heavy use of Microsoft Excel in their business and are aware of some of it's limitations. The program is very extensible through the use of Visual Basic macros, but most people (including me) don't know how to do them. I have recently found and installed Power Utility Pak 6, an add-in for Excel versions 2000 and higher. Once installed, it added a new menu to the top with a variety of useful options.

Head on over to http://www.j-walk.com/ss/pup/pup6/features.htm for a full list of features.

I have just begin to see how I can use the Power Pak to better automate my own statistical spreadsheet for my company. The program is a free trial, and $40 to register.

Your computer uses ports to communicate over the internet. These ports are not physical ports, but software ports with arbitrarily assigned numbers to represent them. While the ports are necessary to do anything online, hackers can use them to try to gain access to your PC. Using special software which will scan your IP address for open ports, hackers can find ports which would grant them access. However, if a port is hidden, or stealthed, they cannot see the ports.

A router with a built-in firewall will conceal the ports because it hides your PC's ports while showing its own ports to the internet, so it offers a level of protection. You can test your PC for open ports, as well as other security tests, using Gibson Research's free Shields-Up service. Head on over to https://www.grc.com/x/ne.dll?bh0bkyd2 and test your PC for free.

Google has a mapping service which allows you to get maps of addresses, driving directions and other information. I have used Mapquest quite a bit and probably still will, but Google's offering is also quite nice. Its very easy to use, and the maps it generates are simple to view. Recently, though, Google has teamed up with Keyhole.com to provide satellite imagery of the location you are searching for. Now, I can't say that the feature is super useful, at least for me, but I'd be lying if I didn't say it was a lot of fun playing with it. Not all locations have corresponding imagery, but most I searched for did. The imagery is also quite smooth in that you can zoom in and out as well as scroll in any direction without having to totally reload the image.

To play around with this, head on over to Google Maps at http://maps.google.com/. To play with the satellite imagery, click on "Satellite" in the nav bar at the top right.

Most of us have, at some point, received a questionable email in our in-boxes. Some emails embed code which makes them potentially harmful to view, or they can utilize a variety of various spam tricks (upcoming article will discuss spam in-depth). You can safely view an email without triggering any badness therein using Outlook Express. Simply right-click the message and select Properties, and click on Details. There you can read the message's header information which will give you the sender's information. If the header information is suspicious, you can then kill the email. If you can't read the headers, you can click Message Source and read the email in HTML source code, which will not trigger any script which may be embedded into the code.

In Outlook, you cannot view the Message Source without first putting the email into the preview pane, which kind of defeats the point. However, you can still view the headers by right-clicking on the subject and choosing Options.

One of the nifty things about the USB bus is that it provides power to the devices plugged into it, providing of course that the device does not draw too much power. Each USB port has a 500 mA power limit, and if you plug too much gear into the port by using a non-powered USB hub, it would be possible to draw too much power from the port, and not all of your devices will work.

You can view the power demands on any USB port in Windows XP from your Device Manager. Simply go to your Device Manger, expand "Universal Serial Bus controllers", and double-click on USB Root Hub. Go to the Power tab and there you will see a list of any devices plugged into that particular port and the power demands that it has. Just add up the power demands of each and you will know what you need.

The other option, of course, is to use a USB hub which has its own AC adapter.

Double Up Your Firewalls

In the past, I have recommended that you disable Windows XP's built-in 

firewall and install a third-party firewall. One of the major reasons 
for this is that the firewall does not monitor outgoing connections, 
which leaves you unprotected from malware already on your PC. This is why 
broadband users, too, should double up on their firewalls. Now, I do 
into recommend installing 2 software firewalls. This would be a bad idea. 
However, many broadband users have a hardware firewall. Some broadband 
modems have them built in, and most routers have a firewall built-in. 
These firewalls do a good job of preventing inbound attachments. But, at the 
same time, you should install and run a software firewall to help you 
catch outgoing connections to the internet. This will help you catch and 
control any malware on your PC trying to make a connection to the 
internet. Between the two firewalls, you will be pretty well protected.

Get a Longhorn-Style sidebar

I recently downloaded and installed a cool little program called Desktop Sidebar. The program brings a lot of the data you may want to the forefront - onto your sidebar. Outlook email, calendar, weather, PC performance data, etc are all brought forward. There are also many, many third-party plug-ins available to expand the functionality of the program. The program installs very easily, but then you need to spend a few minutes to configure it to your liking. After this is done, its kinda cool.

For more info, head over to http://www.desktopsidebar.com/

Convert Your Tapes to MP3

Cassette tapes have pretty much gone the way of the dodo bird, and I like most of you have a collection of them which I never use anymore. Recently the manufacturer of Plusdeck (www.plusdeck.com) contacted us about doing a review on their PC cassette deck drive and that review will be published as soon as I can complete the review, but I thought I would give you a preliminary look at it in this tip. Those of you who would like to safeguard the music on your tapes and then ditch them, you might want to look at an option like this. Of course, you can pull something like this off using a regular cassette deck and the Line-In on your sound card, but the review will outline the benefits of both.

Speed Up Booting Using Less Fonts

Many of the files that load during the boot-up process are fonts. You probably only use a handful of them.  I suggest moving some you never use into another folder.  You won't be able to access the fonts in Word or Notepad.

1. Create a New Folder by right clicking on desktop.  New > Folder.
2. Open "Fonts" in Control Panel.  Switch to Classic View to find them easier.
3. Highlight a group of fonts you never use and move them to the other folder. Repeat if you have tons of fonts.
4. Put the folder into My Documents for easy access.
5. Reboot and see if it starts any faster for you.  If not, just copy the fonts back to the original font folder.

Give Movies Higher Priority

Having trouble watching a movie when you also have a lot of background processes going on? You can get around this by giving the Windows Media Player higher priority as a process running in Windows. Here's what to do:

1. Create a new textfile in the root of c:, but instead of giving it the .txt extension you name it  wmp_AboveNormal.bat
2. Right-click this file and choose 'Edit', you'll see it'll open notepad. Put this line in:
start /AboveNormal C:"Program Files""Windows Media Player"wmplayer.exe %1 %*
3. Save (make sure you save it as .bat, not as .txt) and close.

Now all you have to do is register your mediafiles to this batchfile.
Here's how to do that:

1. In Windows Explorer choose Tools>Folder Options >File Types
2. Scroll down(press A) to the AVI filetype
3. Click 'Change' and point to c:wmp_AboveNormal.bat . Click OK and Close.

Now everytime you double-click an .avi WMP will open with the 'AboveNormal' -priority setting! Repeat steps 4-6 to register all mediatypes you want to be opened this way.)

Customize Menus in Word

In Microsoft Word 2000 and higher, you can easily customize your top menu items and bring options you use often to the forefront. Go to View > Toolbars > Customize. You will get the dialog window with the list of Commands. Instead of using that dialog window, simply find the commands you use most often, press the CTRL key and drag the item up to your top menu. Once released, the icon for that command will appear on your top menu. You can repeat this for any commands you want at the top. You can even customize your other menus while you're at it.

Globally Delete Thumbnail Cache

Windows XP provides a thumbnail view where you can view images in a directory in small thumbnails. When this is done, Windows generates a cache index called Thumbs.db. In theory, this is supposed to be an up-to-date index of the images in that directory, although sometimes the files become out of synch. Deleting the Thumbs.db file will allow Windows to re-index the directory next time you choose Thumbnail view on that folder. But, you can also globally delete all your Thumbs.db files in order to save a little hard drive space. To do so globally, just run a file search for Thumbs.db and delete all the results. Select Search in the Start Menu, choose to search files and folders, search your local hard drives and all sub-folders, then enter the name Thumbs.db and let her rip. When you get the results, just hit CTRL-A to select all, then hit Delete. You'll need to confirm the action, and hit "Yes to All".

 Go 3D With your Desktop

 Windows Longhorn is supposed to sport the ability to turn the desktop into a 3D environment, allowing you to not only minimize windows, but to place them in the background or foreground, one in front of the other. There is a program that will give you the ability to do this now, though. That utility is Spaces.

 "Spaces is an innovative new product for today's personal computer. Spaces unleashes the graphics power of your PC with a new and expansive workspace. Spaces allows you to manage multiple windows efficiently by allowing applications to recede into the desktop onto a user selected workspace. Point, Click and Drag to organize and recall the windows visually. Image files dropped from Explorer or a Web Browser onto the workspace open automatically. It that's simple. The environment can be fully customized to the user's preferences. Spaces provides dynamic animation and physics based effects coupled with panoramic image viewing."

 For more information, head on over to

http://www.spatialresearch.com/spaces/.

 Give your PC USB 2.0 Support

 USB 2.0 is the new standard for USB. It runs at 480 MBps rather than the turtle speed of 12 MBps of the older USB 1.1 spec. Being that many devices now deal with enough data to make use of USB 2.0, its something that is very nice to have. External hard drives, digital cameras and other such devices will connect to a USB 1.1 setup and work, but the throughput would be frustratingly slow. If your PC is over, say, 2 years old, it is likely your PC runs USB 1.1 and not USB 2.0. Many older motherboards come with controllers for USB 1.1, but they do not support USB 2.0. This necessitates a motherboard upgrade in order to use USB 2.0. The work-around is to install a USB 2.0 controller as an internal expansion card. Once you install the card and boot up, you can install the driver from the included setup CD and you will then be able to use USB 2.0 devices.

 For price comparison on USB controllers, go to:

http://pcmech.pricegrabber.com/search_attrib.php/page_id=405/form_keyword=usb+controller.

 Build Your Own External Hard Drive

 External Hard Drives are a pretty popular method of storage outside the PC. They are often used for backup and for exchanging files between PCs. You can buy external hard drives with no problem, but you can also make your own out of an internal hard drive if you happen to have some sitting around. Simply buy yourself a USB drive enclosure. They include a USB interface to your PC and their own power supply. You can usually pick them up for anywhere from $25 to $50 online, and they will cost more if you buy from a retail store. Slip the hard drive into the enclosure, secure it with four screws into the enclosure and attach the power and signal cables. Close up the drive enclosure and plug it into your PC and an electric outlet. Your PC should recognize the new storage device immediately.

 Drive enclosures are also a convenient way to access data you might have on hard drives sitting around your home or office without having to take the case off your desktop and plug it into the IDE cables.

 Go to http://pcmech.pricegrabber.com/search_attrib.php/page_id=351 for

a list of drive enclosures.

Disabling Unsigned Driver Dialog

In Windows XP, there is a warning box whenever you try to install drives that are unsigned. Many times you can just ignore the warning and install the driver anyway, but sometimes you are just stuck right there. There is a way to disable these messages:

(1) Click Start > Run.
(2) Type "gpedit.msc" and hit OK.
(3) Browse to User Configuration - Administrative Templates - System.
(4) Right-click Code signing for Device drivers and select Properties.
(5) On the Settings tab, either select enable, and then select ignore from the appearing listbox..., or click the disable option.
(6) Click Apply then OK.

Alternatively, you can go to Control Panel > System. Then go to the Hardware tab and click on Driver Signing. Choose Ignore in the resulting window.

Take Apps With you on USB Drive

USB drives have gotten larger and cheaper, and hence they have become more and more popular. They are actually cool little devices. They are small enough to fit in a shirt pocket, but you can plug them into any USB port and have immediate access to the data contained therein. These little guys can be used to carry your important data or documents around with you, but they can also be used to carry entire programs if you want to. Want to be able to carry your entire buddy list with you and chat from any PC? Just load it and your favorite chat program into the USB drive. Want to bring your MPS playlist with you? Load it up onto the USB drive (of course you can quickly fill it up with a bunch of MP3 files so you might want a larger drive).

You will want to have a USB 2.0 interface on your PC to use these little drives. Although they will work on USB 1.1, the speed would be grueling in comparison.

For a list of USB drives, go to
http://pcmech.pricegrabber.com/search_attrib.php/page_id=405